Those who experienced the early wilderness of the original World Wide Web will definitely remember hearing that from their speakers. It’s one of those legendary things from Internet history while that piece of technology was still paving and groping around.

These days, social media and tweets and other sounds emanate from our speakers, and the email seems to have taken a sidestep together with the CD. But in reality, the email has never gone out of use and is still in widespread use by companies and for individual personal use. There are still three times more email accounts that Facebook and Twitter accounts combined. Or that emails get six times more click-through than Twitter.

Emails as a marketing strategy is definitely still viable even in this age of mobile devices and social media. However, you need to make sure that your email marketing campaign doesn’t end up as rubbish in inboxes or that people don’t take notice of it.

Technically, email marketing is just a form of direct marketing. But, when compared to social media marketing, the advantages of email marketing far outweigh the efforts of preparing them.

Exact ROI’s can be tracked and has proven to be high when emails are properly done. This form of marketing is often cited as second only to search marketing as an effective online marketing tool.

Advertisers can directly reach large numbers of email subscribers who have opted to receive email communications on subjects subscribers are interested in. The best example for this is the free newsletter for emails.

Almost all internet users check or send email especially on working days.

Emails allow direct transactional business for immediate response to important business or customer concerns.

And, check out these other advantages of why email marketing is still an effective marketing tool for the marketer:

Cost

Simply put, email marketing is cheap because anyone can do it and it can be sent immediately to hundreds of consumers. You could argue that the same goes for social media marketing, but with email marketing you know how many people you sent emails while when you post on, say, Facebook, you cannot ascertain at that moment how many people you reached.

Success Rate

Emails are targeted to specific persons, and this alone is the reason why it is not only cost-effective but also gets a high ROI rate higher than other online direct marketing campaigns. But the trick with email marketing is that you have to get it right; you don’t just send out emails and hope that people will read them.

Flexibility and Measurability

With good analytics available today, it’s fairly easy to track responses to emails. This means the marketer can work out what parts of the campaign are working and what parts are falling flat. Those parts that are failing can then be modified accordingly.

So, how is it done?

Being creative

The overall design of the email – layout, images, color, etc. – must be both eye-catching and relevant. But before anything else, you need to ask each customer permission if they would like to receive emails and if they prefer it in text or HTML. This is the early establishment of a relationship with the customer.

Relevance

Since this is like blind targeting, emails should be relevant and personalized for each recipient to make sure response rates will rise.

Incentive

As the cliché goes, sometimes you need to “dangle a carrot” because the recipient will always think, “What’s in it for me?” You can offer something small for free just by participating and they will more likely respond.

Integration

In reality, businesses can no longer rely on just one method of marketing, nor can they rely on several methods of differentiated marketing. Instead, the best marketing practices utilize integrated marketing where all aspects of promotion work together to create a whole. Email marketing can be integrated with other aspects of a marketing mix such as with social media.